Product Description

In Thisbe Nissen's award-winning debut story collection, characters teeter on the verge of love, of life, of oncoming cataclysms after which Things Will Never Be the Same. Against the varied backdrops of Grateful Dead shows, anniversary parties, sickrooms, and bright Manhattan vestibules, Nissen traces the joy, terror, and electric surprise that flash between people as they suddenly connect. A fifteen-year-old girl whose mother is slowly dying finds solace in the bed of her best friend's older brother. A wife remembers the early romance in her marriage as she watches her husband's hand, shaky with Parkinson's, lift a bite of food to his mouth. Longtime friends are jolted by their unforeseen attraction to each other; new lovers feel their way by instinct in vans, on futons, an during risky, late-night conversation. Knowing, often hilarious, and always pitch-perfect, Nissen's tales hang inside those moments when the heart is acting and the head is watching, hopeful that the heart is doing the right thing.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #802275 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-17
• Released on: 2000-10-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Moving from the chaotic world of adolescence and into adulthood is the theme that links Nissen's bittersweet collection of 25 fierce and quirky short stories, the winner of the John Simmons Fiction Award. Familiar issues are dealt with innovativelyAyoung women (and some men) deal with eating disorders, illness, death, infidelity and love. The cast is an eclectic crew of original, sometimes bizarre, yet recognizable characters with names like Silver Tarkington, Wing MacArdle, Mo?t and Zagarella. The settings range from Santa Cruz to the Midwest, Manhattan to Paris. With self-deprecating and wry humor, Nissen's characters frequently improvise unusual answers for difficult, confusing questions. In "Way Back When in the Now Before Now," Sari, a city-savvy teenager whose mother is dying of cancer, slips into the bed of her best friend's brother, searching for comfort in "the hot sleepy boy-smell with its acrid twinge of sex." "The Estate" charts the fleeting passage of time as experienced by a close-knit group of friends and family summering together annually at a carriage house on a large property. Other stories feature young hippies hoping to make a Grateful Dead show; a group of eight women living in a feminist co-op; a child coping with being pushed too hard by ambitious, cold parents. In these tales, as in others, Nissen displays a sharp talent for fresh detail and dialogue: Barb-Jean, a soprano who conserves her voice for days at a time, communicates through scraps of paper. "When we cleaned the house... at the end of the season we'd find fragments of conversation stuck between the couch cushions and tucked into kitchen drawers: how many people? How many ears? Portuguese on her mother's side I think, SotA5 lettersAends in a y." Many of the stories in this warm, fearless collection trace college love affairs and exquisite, if tentative, sexual explorations between young women. Where a few tales are merely good, several of them are stellar, marking Nissan as an assured writer whose wide-ranging interest in varied people and life situations creates lively fiction. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA-The two dozen stories here are contemporary, memorable, and thought-provoking. All deal with love-requited, denied, outgrown, and enduring. The characters vary in age and gender, and the level of their attachments ranges from the disillusionment of a preschooler with a highly intelligent but mean schoolmate to the adjustments required in a 25-year marriage when Alzheimer's disease encroaches. Characters engage in the casual sex and drug use integral to the culture of Deadheads and Jerry Garcia. Several of the stories deal with the problems of anorexia as they affect the lives of young women, their parents, and, in one striking case, a pet cat. The title story is a study in contrasts as it depicts the gripping passion of a middle-aged science teacher for a teen who had indulged him once and now "couldn't care less." Another story concerns the bizarre accidents plaguing a group of eight college housemates. The writing evokes definite periods and stages in the development of personality and awareness.
Frances Reiher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"[An] awe-inspiring collection of stories. Nissen's characters are young and yearning, and they come together in lovely and unexpected ways." --The Austin Chronicle

"These are requiems for youth. . . . Nissen has a rare, poetic way with the short-story form." --The Hartford Courant -- Review

Customer Reviews

from The Austin Chronicle
Book ReviewsBY AMANDA EYRE WARD November 26, 1999: Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night by Thisbe Nissen The expression of love is the center of Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night, an awe-inspiring collection of short stories by Thisbe Nissen, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Nissen's characters are young and yearning, and they come together in lovely and unexpected ways. A young video clerk in "The Mushroom Girl" pours his heart out into his beloved's intercom: "I think you think I'm crazy, and I'm not. I'm not crazy. It's just that I see a chance for something I think could make me happy in a world that is a generally not very happy place, and I can't just give up and walk away from that without doing everything I know how to do to make it happen." This flustered suitor is probably the most eloquent in the book; Roz Rozenzweig in "The Rather Unlikely Courtship of Edwin Anderson and Roz Rosenzweig" proposes marriage by calling to her lover, "C'mon, Gimp, waddaya say?" Words are not the only means of admitting love in Nissen's stories. In "Accidental Love," Lilith, a high school senior, listens to an older woman who tells her, "Love is an entity unto itself. There are patches of it all over the place. It's not really tangible, but it's there, pools of it." Lilith takes the woman's words to heart when she finds Steff, the boy she loves, fixing lights underneath a Christmas tree: "The TV is perched on a rolling cart, and I wheel it over to where we can watch before I crawl underneath the tree myself. I curl around Steff and bury my hands into the wool belly of his sweater, and we just lie like that for a while: spoons under the tree in this pocket of candle-blue." Although Nissen's characters are generally young and blessed -- traveling Deadheads, college housemates, wealthy New York teens -- Nissen bestows them with earnesty and explores their desires carefully and with gravity. This is a marked change from the cynical city gals currently in fashion in contemporary literature, and I found myself astonishingly moved by her character's simplest movements, like those of the lovers in "Fundamentals of Communication." In a college classroom, the lovers "sit, shifting occasionally, glancing at the glowing wall clock, waiting for 9:15. I can't see them as well now, in the shadows, but I catch the occasional movement in one of their hands, the caress of a finger, press of palm." They seem to have realized another character's observation that safety is "a point of contact." And perhaps, Nissen suggests, that's what love is as well.

Sharp, Sweet, Stealthy
I don't know why I waited so long to read this stellar collection. I agree with the other reviewers--the very best selections might be "Flowers in the Dustbin" and "Grog" and "Poison in the Human Machine," and of course the title story, but they're all good with moments or lines that are amazing. There is geniune emotion in Nissen's stories, and geniune insight in girls growing up, which is what I look for and hope for but rarely ever find. I haven't enjoyed a book so much since Jennifer Paddock's novel, A SECRET WORD, came out in the spring. It's that good! I couldn't recommend OUT OF THE GIRLS' ROOM AND INTO THE NIGHT more highly.

A spunky, heartfelt debut.
I was very much impressed by this book. Nissen's stories really live on the page, and many of them have been difficult for me to forget. Usually, I'll read through a story collection in a day or two, but I found myself reading this one more slowly: I wanted to hold on to each story for a while--to let the feelings it touched off in me finish washing through me before I moved on. I was reminded of the writing of Abby Frucht, and Elizabeth McCracken, and (a little bit) of Lorrie Moore: Thisbe Nissen has the same talent that they do for opening the joy of her characters up into pain, and vice versa. Also, her characters have the same sort of camouflaged vulnerability. Too much of the fiction being published today seems to deny that people can matter to one another, that they can either hurt one another or preserve one another, but Nissen never forgets this. Even when her characters try to close themselves off to the people around them, those people always come bounding back into their lives. This book is being published by a university press and deserves a wider readership than I'm afraid it's going to get. If you have a chance, you should pick it up. The stories carry a real emotional power, and they will stay with you for a long time.